


He's Obviously a Vampire

by coppersunshine (Saeirin)



Category: Leverage
Genre: Established Relationship, Multi, Post-Canon, Vampire?Eliot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 05:35:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10430259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saeirin/pseuds/coppersunshine
Summary: Eliot's stopped eating. Parker thinks she knows why.





	

Parker knew something was wrong, really wrong, when Eliot stopped eating. He still cooked, at least--it would have been _catastrophically_ bad if Eliot ever stopped cooking--but he no longer ate. Pushed his meal around his plate at their dinners, though Eliot had always insisted on their finishing their plates--respect the food, he growled. Didn’t even taste it while he cooked, relying only on his own knowledge to tell if the spices were right or wrong. She knew because she watched him. She always watched her boyfriends, careful, studying. People were hard, and she wanted to get this right. So when Eliot got--weird, or weird for Eliot, at any rate--she noticed.  

She didn’t say anything. Eliot always clammed up at personal questions, and she knew if he had wanted them to know he would have told them. She kept an eye on him though, surreptitiously checking to see if whatever was wrong had spread to the rest of Eliot.

The changes were obvious once she started looking. He didn’t sit in his usual chair during their briefing, grumbling about the sunlight hurting his eyes, and lurked in the shadowy corner of the room, When Hardison bitched at Eliot to stop his pacing, he sat down in the chair furthest from the window.

His food was different too, apart from his not eating it. It wasn’t that it didn’t taste good, or right--even without tasting his food Eliot was a miracle in the kitchen--but what he made changed. Hardison asked for spaghetti and Eliot bitched about that, growled his scorn of the dish when Parker _knew_ spaghetti was one of Eliot’s favorite meals to make.

There were little things too, how he had started to always wear a hood up outside, or squinted a little too much in the sunlight, and the way that his fighting somehow got _better_ , impossibly, quicker and more perfect. He stopped letting her pester him when he shaved (“Sometimes a man needs his privacy, Parker”) and when he came out of the bathroom there were little unshaven patches for no reason Parker could surmise. He shied away from her touch too, just a little before he made himself relax--or at any rate, give the appearance of relaxing.

So Parker worried and observed, and then she asked Hardison.

“Do you know what’s wrong with Eliot?”

“You noticed too, huh?”

“He stopped eating,” she answered simply.

He sighed. “I dunno, babe. Give him time, maybe he’ll tell us.”

So she kept watching, and waiting, and almost couldn’t bear it. Eliot had always been Eliot, and now he was not-Eliot pretending to still be Eliot--which proved him to be Eliot in the most Eliot way possible, because Eliot would always protect them, even if she’d rather know the truth. When the panic overwhelmed her she called Sophie.

“Parker? Parker, it’s 4 in the morning!”

“Eliot stopped eating.”

“Eliot stopped eating?”

“He won’t even taste his food when he cooks!” Her voice choked.

“Okay, Parker, deep breaths. I’m sure there’s some explanation for this, okay?”

Parker exhaled long and slow.

“Good. Take deep breaths, and when you can, tell me everything.”

She breathed, and felt her heart settle for all she was still strung-out and anxious.

“He stopped eating. He wouldn’t make spaghetti, and he squints too much in sunlight and grimaces, and he wears hoodies up all the time now, and he doesn’t like touching me anymore and his shaving is weird and his fighting changed. Got _better_ somehow. Hardison says we should give him some time, but I can just feel that something is wrong, really wrong--”

“Parker, breathe, all right? Ignore Hardison. He means well, but if Eliot doesn’t want to tell you something, he isn’t going to tell you unless you ask him. Just be straightforward about it. Now, go get some sleep, okay?”

“Okay.”

She didn’t sleep though, didn’t return to their bed, just huddled on the kitchen floor breathing her fear deep and slow until Eliot, the early riser, came out of the bedroom an hour later.

“Parker? Why are you up so early?” He knelt on the floor. “What’s wrong?”

She gave a sharp, bitter laugh. “That’s what I’m supposed to ask you!”

“Hey, come here,” he said, and she crawled to him, clinging to him, letting his presence ground her.

“You stopped eating,” she said, and it was an accusation.

He sighed, and kissed her hair. “Is that what this is?”

“Eliot, you _stopped eating_.”

“I know, darling, I know. And I’m gonna tell you, okay? Just not now. I can’t.

“No, Eliot, _now,_ ” and her voice was pain.

“Parker,” he sighed. “This ain’t something that I can tell you easy. I’m not sure of it myself. But I promise I’m fine, darling. You’ve been watching me, right? Do I look sick to you?”

“No,” she whispered.

“This ain’t a threat to you or Hardison, and it ain’t a threat to us. I’m not going anywhere. Come back to bed, okay?”

“Only if you come too.”

He scooped her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom, laying down beside her and holding her as her ragged breathing calmed and she slowly fell asleep, nestled against Hardison.

 

Breakfast was made the next morning as always, her and Hardison waking to kitchen smells and kitchen noise. Eliot had strident objections to gummy frogs and fortune cookies for breakfast. It almost felt normal again, until Eliot sat their plates before them with no pretense of making one for himself. Parker gave him a look, and he shrugged. “No point in wasting food.”

They didn’t have any job they were on, just a client meeting scheduled for the next day, and pretty soon after breakfast Eliot made excuses for some errand he needed to run and disappeared.

“He doesn’t want to tell us.”

Hardison gave a wry grin. “Since when has Eliot ever wanted to tell us anything important?”

“Sophie said I should just ask him outright, that he’d never tell us on his own, but he still wouldn’t tell me. So I guess we’ll just have to figure it out ourselves. Consider this a briefing.”

“Whoa, okay, babe. Aren’t I supposed to run those?”

“Hmm.” Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, well you don’t have all the evidence yet. Now listen!”

She shoved Hardison onto the couch and dragged their whiteboard over.

“So far I see only one possible solution.” She wrote a word big on the whiteboard and circled it. “Vampires.”

“You think Eliot’s a vampire?”

“It’s the only explanation.” She started ticking off evidence on her fingers. “One, he stopped eating. Two and three, he doesn’t like sunlight and wears a hood up all the time now. Four, he wouldn’t make spaghetti; five, he had patchy spots after he shaved; and six, he stiffens when I touch him. Seven; his fighting got better. Faster.”

“Come on, how does-- does spaghetti and shaving have anything to do with him being a vampire?”

“Spaghetti has garlic. Everyone knows vampires hate garlic. And he couldn’t shave very well if he couldn’t look in the mirror, could he, hmm?”

“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, because I’m worried. And Sophie told me it’s important to pay attention to my emotions. I don’t know why you’re _not_ worried.”

“Parker, I _am_ worried. But I trust Eliot. I know he can take care of himself, and ourselves, and--and two dozen puppies in a dust storm if he wanted to! He’ll tell us when he’s ready to.”

“Well, then why wouldn’t he tell me last night?”

“Probably because he’s not ready yet! How long has it been since he stopped eating?”

“Three days.”

“See, that’s nothing. Eliot’s probably used to not eating that long, off getting chased through the jungle by crazy terrorists or some such. Give him at least a week, okay? Eliot’s gone for the day, so how ‘bout we just have some fun on our own, whatever you want.”

“I guess. There _was_ this one building I wanted to jump off…”

Alec groaned. “I walked right into that, didn’t I?”

 

Jumping off of _only_ one building wasn’t enough to calm Parker’s nerves, while Alec’s nerves couldn’t handle more than the one, and he excused himself as soon as she suggested a rooftop tour of the city, mentioning some work he wanted to do for the client meeting tomorrow. Parker knew better, but she didn’t say anything, just kissed him before dropping him back off at the offices and careening off through the mid-day traffic.

To be fair, he did work some on the job, digging a little deeper into the financials before giving it up and settling in to spend some time just seeing what was new on the internet since his adrenaline-fueled absence. He was just starting his fourth, blissedly calm cat video when Eliot came in, kicking off his boots and flinging a coat onto the chair before heading to the kitchen--not typical Eliot behavior; he was the neatest of all of them. Hardison gave him a couple minutes before heading in--Eliot valued control above all, and clearly needed some time to regain it--making sure to scuff his feet enough so Eliot knew he was coming, just in case.

He sidled into the kitchen (rule one of dealing with upset Eliot: leave all exits available) and leaned up against the counter. “Hey, man, what’s up?”

He was answered only by the slow, precise turning of the pages of a cookbook--Eliot’s first cookbook, the one Toby had given him.

“Look, man, if you don’t want to talk to us that’s okay. But, uh, Parker, she’s real worked up, she’s out flinging herself off every building in the city to feel better, and, well, I kind of thought you were okay telling us things, and it’s fine if you’re not, but I want you to know that you can talk to us, and that...that we’re here for you, whether you like it or not, and, and--”

Eliot spoke with teeth gritted. “I’m _fine_ , Hardison.”

“Aw, man, now that’s just a straight up lie, I thought we were past that. All right, you don’t want to talk, that’s cool. Let me know if you need something, alright?”

When Hardison had left Eliot slumped against the counter. He knew he wasn’t fine, whatever he pretended, and he was doing a damn poor job of hiding it, his body betraying him, so wracked with guilt the taste of food disgusted him. It wasn’t something he would have spared a second thought for ten years ago, but the team had changed him too much, softened him.

Whatever they might think, Hardison and Parker couldn’t know. It would destroy them.

 

At a certain point, enough was enough. Hardison did his best to respect Eliot’s much-valued privacy, but this was threatening the team and their relationship. Eliot might think he was protecting them, but he was breaking them.

So he did what any hacker and concerned boyfriend would have done: he sat down with his very favorite laptop and called up the data for Eliot’s GPS trackers--one in the wallet, one in each of his cars, one hidden in a bracelet, one sewn into his leather coat, and one in his boots. With a man as paranoid as Eliot Spencer there was no such thing as overkill.

Sure enough, two were offline, probably found and destroyed, and he hadn’t worn his bracelet, so no good there. The cars, though, were still good--Hardison had gotten better at finding hiding spots--and the one in the boot was also good, and probably the most useful, anyway.

Eliot had been making regular trips to the same two places--always a different route, of course--a local hospital and some house in a residential area. The suburb was no good for cameras, but the hospital had decent security and Hardison was able to find Eliot heading through the front doors, hood up, a classic scowl on his face and a glare for the camera which Hardison had no doubt was directed at him.

The house in question belonged to a Charles Martin, and it didn’t take much work at all to find out that Mr. Martin had worked at the same shady corporation Leverage International had taken down just a week before, as a security guard, and died just three days before due to complications stemming from being repeatedly beaten on the head.

And well, you didn’t have to be a genius hacker to connect the dots, even if it did take a genius hacker to dig deeper, to look and see that the man’s wife had cancer and was now taking care of two kids alone, swamped in medical bills and a second mortgage--or would have been if a particular ‘insurance agent’ hadn’t showed up to inform her of a highly generous and previously nonexistent life insurance policy.

Somewhere in all the hacking and realizations Hardison began to feel like absolute shit, because Mr. Martin was the sort of man that Leverage would have tried to help, and instead they did just about the furthest opposite.

A hand slammed down his laptop screen. “You shouldn’t be looking at that,” Eliot growled.

“What did you expect me to do, man? You’re scaring us, and it’s hurting the team!”

“And you think this wouldn’t?”

“Less than angsty Eliot would! We’re a team, a family! We deal with things together. I know you have this deep-seated need to protect us or something, but this ain’t the kind of thing you hide. We need to look at all of our plans, revamp our approach, and make sure this never happens again, not pretend it never happened.”

“You don’t get it, do you Hardison? There’s no way to do that. Every time I take someone out, there’s a chance they’ll die from it. There are no guarantees in my line of work. So either I stop doing my job and Leverage ends, or we take that risk.”

“You’ve...you’ve been working for all these years knowing that any of the people you take down might die? All in the pursuit of good? No, man, that’s crazy. No way Nate would have gone along with that.”

“You think Nate didn’t know? Nate’s not a fool, Hardison. He looked at the facts and made his choice. The opportunity to help people, really help people--you don’t get that without taking risks. I minimize the chance when I can, but these men knew the risks when the took the job.”

“See, you’re trying to blow this off like it’s nothing, but man, you stopped eating and you been acting all kinds of strange lately, so don’t try--”

“I ain’t--I ain’t--damnit, Hardison! I ain’t trying to blow this off. It’s not nothing--a man died! But I’m not trying to pretend it isn’t part of the job and always has been, so I help the family and move on. And yeah, maybe I been a little worked up about it, but it’s been a while since I killed an innocent man, accident or not, and maybe I ain’t as jaded as I used to be with you two softening me up, making--

“Hold up, hold up. You trying to tell me this has happened before?”

“Yeah.”

“How many?”

“A few. Three, now.”

Hardison squealed. “We’ve killed three men? Three innocent men?”

Eliot growled. “Damnit, Hardison, you know how long we’ve been in business? Seven years now, Leverage has been up and running. The fact I ain’t killed more by accident is a goddamn miracle.”

Parker dropped from the ceiling. “So you’re not a vampire?”

“What?” Eliot said, incredulous.

She shrugged. “Well, are you?”

“No, Parker, I’m not a vampire! Why the hell would you think that?”

Parker handed him a list, which he read, scowling. “Wait, aversion to sunlight? Did neither of you remember that I had an eye exam? And spaghetti? Look, sometimes a man just wants to make a dish other than spaghetti, all right? I can’t _believe_ you thought I was a vampire.”

“When all the evidence points to one conclusion, I have to believe it, no matter how bizarre,” she parroted, then looked crestfallen. “Are you _sure_ you’re not a vampire?”

“Uh, yeah, pretty sure, Parker.”

She sighed. “Well, that’s good. It would have been terribly inconvenient on the con. I was really looking forward to vampire sex though.”

Eliot looked stunned “I, uh...I could wear fangs, I guess.”

Parker beamed. Hardison choked.

“Really?”

“Uh...yeah.”

“All right, all right,” Hardison said, “Nastiness aside, we really need to talk about the fact that a man died!

Eliot spoke. “We already did.”

“Nu-uh, not with her. Babe, did you hear all that?”

“Yeah.”

“Well? How come you aren’t freaking out? Why am I the only person freaking out?”

She looked caged, and confused. “It’s hard. I can’t…” She turned to Eliot, pleading. “Tell him.”

“Look, Hardison, innocent is a relative term. Maybe he wasn’t involved directly, but he knew what his boss was up to, chose to look aside. What is it…’When times are hard, man gets a job, might not look too close at what it is--”

“Oh, don’t you dare quote _Firefly_ against me.”

“And, and look at all the deaths we prevented! How many people were going to die because that company was messing with the reports? And when I went against that guy, that was--was when Parker got trapped. I didn’t have time to mess around being careful of his head, and maybe I should of, but how would we feel now if Parker was in jail and thousands of people were dying, huh? Sometimes there are hard choices, Hardison, and that’s a part of the job, always has been. Just because you never had to see it don’t mean it wasn’t happening. Me and Parker, we always been able to make the tough choices, make sure we survive, and so we ain’t shook as bad when something like this happens because it was bound to. No point dwelling on what was done, cause dead is done and there ain’t nothing anyone can do about that except make sure the man’s family is cared for.”

Hardison stared at the floor, knew Eliot was right and also knew that for Eliot to talk so much meant it was important to know, but he couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. If he had done his job better, _been_ better, Parker wouldn’t have gotten trapped and there wouldn’t have been a need for Eliot to fight Charles Martin and he’d still be alive. There was always something more he should have done, and he was afraid of never doing enough--it was what kept him up late working on projects and getting more information and access to better systems and forging badges and jackets and all the million things he worked on to make jobs go smooth, to prepare for when things went sideways.

“Hey, Hardison,” Eliot said, soft. “You aren’t blaming yourself for this. This wasn’t on you, so don’t make it. This was my action, and I’m not letting you take it on yourself.”

“No. If I hadn’t overlooked the heat sensor…”

“Yeah, well I hit the guy, all right? I’m the one who fucked him up so bad he died of it, so don’t try to say that was on you!”

“It’s on _us_ ,” said Parker, with finality. “We’re all blamed together.”

Hardison looked at her. “Yeah?”

‘We’re a team, all of us, together. We all caused his death, together.”

“All right,” Eliot nodded. “We’ve been the best awhile. Now we need to be better than that. Together. But that means we can’t pretend that nobody gets hurt. I hit people, and they get hurt. It’s part of the job. You can’t ignore that, Hardison. Even if someone dies because of it. I protect you, and I protect the clients. No matter what happens. That’s not negotiable”

“Deal. Provided,” Hardison said, “that you start eating again. And tell us things that are relevant to the team. I know you need your secrets, but you start doing your angsty loner thing again and we’re going to have to go to drastic measures.”

“Deal.” They sealed it with their handshake--two slaps and a fist-bump into crossed arms--and stood, a bit uncertain, until Parker hauled them into a hug, having decided that she needed both her boys near, needed the team, all together, and that her boyfriends needed that too.

After a minute, Hardison spoke. “Now, we’ve got nothing until that client meeting tomorrow, right?”

“Uhuh.”

“Well, I, uh, I happen to know a place we can go, get Eliot fitted his very own pair of fangs.”

Parker bounced. Eliot scowled.

“Damnit, Hardison!”

“Hey, babe, I seem to recall you offering.”

“Yes!” said Parker. “Let’s go, now!”

She broke their hug, dragging Eliot and Hardison out the door.

“Uh, we’ll need the car keys, babe.”

“No time for that! Hot-wiring’ll be faster.”

Eliot and Hardison gave each other a look.

“You got yourself into this, man.”

“Yeah, well don’t pretend this hasn’t been a thing of yours too since you first watched _Angel_. The things I do for you people.”

“Aw, you know you love us.”

“Yeah, you know I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> There's a perfectly good version of this where Eliot's actually a vampire, but somehow this is what I ended up with.  
> I'm coppersunshine on tumblr if you want to say hey or flail about the OT3 together.  
> Please let me know what you think!


End file.
